Thank you for reading in 2022

And have a Happy New Year in 2023

Merry Christmas, and apologies for the long break between posts. I wasn’t actually planning a big holiday, but I got Covid just before Christmas, and since then we’ve had a continual series of bugs. Nothing serious or even particularly bad — in fact this round of Covid was no worse than the continual colds I’ve had since late October, along with everyone. Normal posting will return on Monday.

Thanks to everyone who has subscribed over the year, and to all those substackers who have recommended me (I will do a post on my favourite ones in the coming weeks, it’s on my to-do list). Although I hate to boast, well unless I can disguise it under some thin veneer of false modesty, the growth in numbers has been surprising to me — from 1,230 on New Year’s Day to over 11,000 now. For those thinking of joining Substack, I highly recommend it; I’ve very much enjoyed writing here in 2022, and so, like one of those annoying episodes of a comedy show where they just create some thin narrative in order to replay bits from previous episodes, here’s my end-of-year round-up of the pieces I’m most happy with.

The Mind Virus Destroying Academia

I believe that what is taught inside universities ends up having huge real world effects, the most extreme example being the death and destruction following May 2020; the huge increase in US homicide rates after that summer would not have been possible without the ideas that have spread through academia, ideas which the authors of Cynical Theories compare to a virus. However crazed some of them appear to outsiders, they can always become normalised if enough high-status people declare a belief in them; sometimes they end up as the basis of law.

Living and losing the first culture war

Edward Watts’ The Final Pagan Generation offers disturbing parallels between Roman polytheists in the fourth century and modern-day conservatives; this was a group who confidently believed that what they were witnessing among the young, the city-dwellers, the educated and women was simply a fad, and that the old religion would survive just as it always did. It wasn’t a fad, but a moral and cultural revolution in which their worldview was consigned to history.

Having written all that, there are key differences: modern progressivism is descended from Christianity, and it’s true that, as Tom Holland put it, 21st century political debate is all about who gets to be on the Cross; but it is also what Chantal Delsol has called ‘repaganisation’. For some people the Great Awokening might be simply ‘the first last shall be last’, but for many others it’s just ancestor worship, the default human belief; the sexual revolution is in fact a sexual reaction and Christian ideas about the sanctity of life might not last the new reformation. And unlike Christians in late antiquity, progressives are not winning the battle of the cradle.

Children of Men is really happening

One reader asked if I was going to list my best books of 2022, but in truth I haven’t read many books from 2022 in 2022. I’m a bit slow on that front — I’ve only just finished season 2 of Stranger Things — but it’s mainly that most of the books I’ve read are related to work projects, so I haven’t had the time. Among the few I read were Paul Morland’s Tomorrow’s People, the subject of this piece, my most read on Substack. (I also read Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, which is very good, and needs to be seen by more people.) 

Among the various pre-2022 books I got through, Yuri Slezkine’s The House of Government was a stand-out for me, although you might wish to book some time off to read it: it’s a beast.

The Brexiteers had one job

The big political trend of 2022 has been the collapse of the Conservative Party — and a big part of this was Brexit, and what followed. The referendum was the archetypal example of a problem Eric Kaufmann described in Whiteshift, where taboos about expressing opposition to immigration lead people to either invent reasons for why they dislike it, or focus on something indirectly related to the subject. As Kaufmann suggested, it would be healthier, and less prejudiced, if people simply felt comfortable saying ‘I don’t like high levels of immigration because this is my home’, and their elected politicians and ruling class respected that. But ‘By compelling the media, politicians and voters to express immigration concerns in an anti-EU idiom,’ Kaufmann argued: ‘the anti-racism norm inadvertently contributed to a climate in which the EU became a punching bag. This helped nudge the country towards Brexit.’ 

The Leave vote would not have happened had it not, for many people, been their first and only real chance to register their anger and despair about what had been happening since 1997 — a demographic transformation most people did not want, and which has since sped up under the Tories, who have to come to believe their own propaganda about what the vote was about.

Among my other pieces, I wrote about The death of the urban Tory, on Britain’s big sort, and why density is destiny in politics. I wrote about whether there is such a thing as Scouse exceptionalism, and on the unstoppable rise of British twee. I also wrote about Liz Truss and how strange it was that someone from a Left-wing family became a Tory. I still haven’t got around to watching the new Middle-earth series on Amazon, but I imagine that Tolkien would have hated it. Following the death of the Queen, I wrote about the rational case for monarchy.

I’ve written a couple of times about the problem of housing costs, including this piece on a society with cheap luxuries and unaffordable necessities. One of the most popular things I wrote was on the Telford grooming scandal, subject of a GB News documentary. Finally, with the Tories in such deep trouble, a piece on what small-c conservatives should believe, a theme I hope to expand into short book form in the next year.

Once again, thanks for subscribing, and have a Happy New Year!